All posts tagged ‘PDF’

[Above: A screenshot from Wizards of the Coast's new dndclassics.com website. See the above image gallery for a sneak peek of some of the re-released products, as well as Wizards staff members reminiscing about their favorite old-school D&D adventures and rule books.]

We all remember our first time. Perhaps your best friend taught you. Or, someone showed you at recess or in the library after school. Maybe it happened with a group of friends. Or, alone in your bedroom, you figured it out all by yourself.

No, no that. I'm talking about the first time you played Dungeons & Dragons.

For many of us, those early experiences of exploring dungeons, slaying monsters and devouring bowls of Cheetos are inextricably linked to specific gaming products and their charmingly amateurish artwork of animated skeletons, spider queens, and aqua-colored dungeon maps.

Who can forget B1: In Search of the Unknown? Included in the D&D Basic Set, this adventure introduced many gamers to D&D. Or Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits, the epic culmination of the seven-part adventure that began with the twin trilogies G1-3: Against the Giants and "Drow" series of modules D1-D3? Or, one of my personal favorites, the deadly Tomb of Horrors, whose endless traps and tricks and demi-lich Acererak killed nearly every adventuring party that tried to enter it?

Alas, many of those rulebooks and adventures from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s have disappeared -- forgotten, made obsolete, or discarded with the trash by parents when young gamers went off to college. (Thanks, Mom!). Only occasionally do these out-of-print products resurface at yard sales, online shopping sites, or at specialized auctions. If they can be located, they're often only available for exorbitant prices.

Now, they're been brought back to life. Like a cleric casting a resurrection spell, Wizards of the Coast, the maker of D&D, is waving its magic wand and raising these lost products from the dead.

GeekDad can exclusively report that Wizards of the Coast is announcing today the launch of dndclassics.com, a site selling hundreds of these decades-old products available for download in PDF format.

The products for sale include a combination of core rules books, adventure series (what us old gamers call "modules"), supplement materials, and various backlist products from most of the D&D rules systems known to gaming-kind -- Basic, AD&D, AD&D 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition, 3.5 and 4.0 -- as well as specific campaign settings like Planescape and Ravenloft. Much of the materials on dndclassics.com date to the "Golden Age" of role-playing games, back when Gary Gygax's TSR Hobbies, Inc. ran the role-playing game industry, before his company was purchased by Wizards of the Coast.

"A lot people have a passion for and memories of these older products," said Liz Schuh, who directs publishing and licensing for Dungeons & Dragons. "We don't want them to go to torrent sites. Why not give them a legal route?" Schuh added that idea of re-releasing old products was a result of listening to fans on the forums, with the goal of letting "people play the D&D they want in the format they want."

In the first wave of items available today, more than 80 products can be downloaded from dndclassic.com, everything from the 1981 D&D Basic Game "Red Box" Rulebook to the 4th edition adventure H1: Keep on the Shadowfell, originally released in 2008. Prices range from $4.99 for most modules, to $17.99 for the newer manuals and supplements. The site is operated in partnership with DriveThruRPG, which claims to be "the largest RPG download store" on the Internet.

Mike Mearls, senior manager of Dungeons & Dragons research and development, likened the project of sifting through his company's vast archives and deciding which products to make available again much like a movie studio "going through a back catalogue" of old movies to decide what to release on DVD and Blu-ray. "You can always find these things on eBay," said Mearls. "But like baseball cards in the 1970s, no one took care of them. You have to pay a premium for it."

The PDFs are made from fresh scans of these old products. "We've rescanned everything," Schuh said. "It's the highest quality you can get out there." (I'd generally concur: The scans are good quality, and best of all, the PDFs are searchable. For example, you can search 1980's Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits for all instances of the word "Lolth" or "spider ship," which could come in handy during game play. I did see a few errors in the reproduction of multi-part gatefold-style maps, but hopefully these glitches will be resolved.)

Nostalgia is a powerful force in gaming, especially for gamers of my generation who first played D&D in the 1970s and 1980s. Was there something lost along the way, as TSR and RPGs became more successful? Is there anything we can learn from going back in time, and reading or trying to play the game with these old modules and rule books?

Mearls feels that players should appreciate the older game products, which allowed for more varied, less predictable styles of play. "Older style adventures, there is no script," he said, adding that players enjoy the "uncertainty" of the games' "element of chaos."

In the past year, Wizards has also been releasing premium print versions of AD&D rulebooks like their Dungeon Masters Guide and Monster Manual. They are scheduled to release more 1st edition AD&D and 2nd edition core rulebooks, and key 3.5 books, in the coming months.

The company also plans on releasing "conversion notes" so the older gaming products available on dndclassics.com can be played with newer editions of D&D, including the latest revamp of the rules, what is being called "D&D Next," now in development and scheduled to be released sometime in 2014.

Personally, I'm excited to get my hands on a copy of the AD&D manuals Deities & Demigods, from 1981, which finally let Dungeon Masters pit immortals like the Norse god Thor or heroes like Fritz Leiber's The Gray Mouser against players. (The book also came in handy for school reports on mythology. See the image gallery for more on that.) It'll be cool to see Vault of the Drow again, too. Gary Gygax's seminal 1978's module more or less introduced the idea of "dark elves" to fantasy.

Hopefully, in the next wave of products released by Wizards later this year, we'll see some of my other favorite items, like S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, which if you recall was actually a crash-landed space ship that dungeoneers had to explore. That blew my geeky mind back in the 1980s.

Oh, and that deadly, nasty, sadomasochistic and awesome Tombs of Horrors. I can't wait to take on that lich again--or die trying.

[ADDITIONAL NOTE: Thanks to a watchful reader, I have a correction: I neglected to mention in my original post that Wizards is also releasing, on March 19 of this year, Dungeons of Dread, these very same S-Series dungeons I was just pining for, in a premium hardcover edition. The collection includes four classic, stand-alone Advanced Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules: S1: Tomb of Horrors; S2: White Plume Mountain; S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks; and S4: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. More info.]

Created by Tom Moldvay, this 1981 edition of the D&D Basic Rulebook was actually the second edition of Basic D&D. The first edition, created by J. Eric Holmes in 1977, had a blueprint-style pale blue cover.

This 1981 edition was sold as part of the boxed D&D Basic Set as well as a separate product. It was the first true stand alone edition of what became "Basic D&D." Previous editions of Basic D&D had been based on OD&D ("Original D&D").

G1-3: Against the Giants was originally published as three separate adventures: G1: Steading of the Giant Chief, G2: The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, and G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King in 1978. Later, in 1981, they were collected in this G1-G3 edition.

The introductory text sets the scene: "Giants have been raiding the lands of men in large bands, with giants of different sorts in these marauding groups. Death and destruction have been laid heavily upon every place these monsters have visited. A party of the bravest and most powerful adventurers has been assembled and given the charge to punish the miscreant giants."

This trilogy, written by Gary Gyagx, also served as the start to the seven-part campaign that also includes D1: Descent into the Depths of the Earth, D2: Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, and D3: Vault of the Drow, and Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits -- named the top-rated adventure of all time by Dungeon Magazine.

Gygax once said he was inspired to create the "giants" series by the "heroic adventuring" of The Incomplete Enchanter by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague deCamp.

Bugbear guards, orc guards, sink holes, covered pits and portcullises -- all of D&D's classic dangers can be found in Against the Giants, this classic dungeon from 1978.

Says Mike Mearls, senior manager of Dungeons & Dragons research and development, "I’ve run this adventure in 3rd edition, 4th edition, and in D&D Next. It’s a litmus test of sorts for our playtesting. If the current version of D&D can’t handle The Steading of the Hill Giant Chieftain as written, there’s something wrong with the game. The tipping point for this adventure always comes early on. Do you sneak in and spy on the giants, or charge on in for a frontal assault? If you’ve read the adventure, you know what the right answer is."

Some of the charmingly amateurish artwork from Against the Giants. D&D's artists have gotten better, but cruder images such as seen here are seared into the memory banks of many an older gamer who played D&D back in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 2004, the Giants series (grouped with the entire 7-part giants-drow-demonweb series) was ranked 1st in the greatest Dungeons & Dragons adventure of all time by Dungeon Magazine.

T1-4: The Temple of Elemental Evil (1985), written by Gary Gygax and Frank Mentzer, was published in August 1985 as TSR's first "super module." Its 128-page book was easily double the size of any of TSR's adventures to date; it also included 16-page map book.

The first part of this mega-adventure was published years earlier as T1: "The Village of Hommlet" (1979). It was named the #4 adventure in Dungeon magazine's "The 30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time" list.

This map comes from N1: Against The Cult of the Reptile God, whose intro text begins this way:

"Terror by night! The village of Orlane is dying. Once a small and thriving community, Orlane has become a maze of locked doors and frightened faces. Strangers are shunned, trade has withered. Rumors flourish, growing wilder with each retelling. Terrified peasants flee their homes, abandoning their farms with no explanation. Others simply disappear …

"No one seems to know the cause of the decay -- why are there no clues? Who skulks through the twisted shadows of the night? Who or what is behind the doom that has overtaken the village? It will take a brave and skillful band of adventurers to solve the dark riddle of Orlane!"

N1: Against The Cult of the Reptile God appeared in 1982, and was written by Douglas Niles. It was named #19 in Dungeon Magazine's "30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time."

Deities & Demigods (1980) was the fourth hardcover release for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Despite being "just" a supplement, Gary Gygax saw Deities & Demigods as a way deities could take their proper spot in D&D campaigns as the patrons of clerics and as the exemplars of a character's ideal alignment.

Sadly, despite Gygax's original intent, for many players Deities & Demigods became another compendium of ultra-powerful "monsters" that could be killed by players.

It also came in handy for term papers. Says D&D's R&D Team Member James Wyatt: "I used this book as the main source for a paper I wrote in like 10th grade comparing various world mythologies. I was lucky to get a C!"

Perseus has armor class 3 and fights as the equivalent of a 15th level paladin.

Deities and Demigods gave all your favorite gods and heroes stats so your characters could kick their asses.

Mike Mearls, senior manager of Dungeons & Dragons research and development, also used the tome for school work. "I used this book as the primary reference for a project on mythology in 6th grade. Maybe my teacher was less discriminating than James’, but I got an A."

One of the cool aspects of Deities and Demigods were all the cosmological and religious answers it provided.

The holy text finally explained how, for example, the inner planes -- planet earth, the solar system, the universe and all of its parallels such as The Positive Material Plane, The Elemental Planes, The Ethereal Plane, The Plane of Shadow, etc. -- are connected to this funky disk of outer planes (e.g. The Outer Planes of Alignment) via the "yellow brick road" of the astral plane.

D3: Vault of the Drow, from 1978 and written by Gary Gygax, was the sixth adventure released by TSR. Like its two predecessors in the D-series, it was originally published with a purple monochrome cover (shown above).

During his lifetime, Gygax offered a few different sources for his drow. Ultimately, they're probably derived from the Svartálfaheimr — the dark elves of Norse mythology.
The drow have been making appearances since G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King, but they are given the full treatment here, including a description of one of their cities and details on their cutthroat noble families.

The Vault was the 6th part in a seven-part campaign that began with the three-part Against the Giants series and continued in the D-series, concluding with module Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits.

Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits was part seven of an epic campaign that began with the giants and drow series. In this last installment, characters are transported to another plane and find themselves in the muti-dimensional labyrinth known as the Demonweb. Characters must find their way out of the web, and then must defeat the evil demigoddess Lolth. Scary stuff.

This map shows the inter-weaved, multi-dimensional lair of Lolth, the evil spider queen, that befuddled many a player.

Bruce Cordell, another member of D&D's R&D team, offered this reminiscence:

"Queen of the Demonweb Pits was the first published adventure I experienced as a player. Because only my friend JD and I were available, we each made up 2 characters to adventure through the module. My two characters were Yor Demonslayer, a fighter, and Everin the Enchanter, an elf wizard. I was so excited by these characters, who were also the highest level characters I'd yet played, that I drew each one, colorized the drawings, backed each on cardboard, and protected them each under a layer of transparent grocery "cling-wrap." (30 years later, I still have them.)

"Unfortunately, my friend JD interpreted his –1 penalty on attack rolls curse he gained during the adventure to mean that he should act unpredictably. At one of the Demonweb crossings over an endless abyss, his character pushed Everin over, exclaiming, "I'm cursed!" So, that was the end for Everin."

The Ghost Tower of Inverness was originally written for the Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Game Tournament at Wintercon VIII, Detroit, 1979. Used in official tournaments, this adventure contains a challenging setting, a scoring system and characters specially prepared for the adventure.

The module was named #30 in Dungeon Magazine's "30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time."

From 1980-1983, Dungeons & Dragons was exploding in popularity, and most players first bought and used the Basic Set as their introduction to the game. Because of this fact, this module B2: Keep on the Borderlands, which appeared in the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, went on to become the module with the largest print run of all time, with an estimated 1.5 million copies made and distributed.

Once it was created in 1979, B2: Keep on the Borderlands immediately replaced In Search of the Unknown in the Basic boxed set.

This module was voted number 7 in Dungeon Magazine's "30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time."

First appearing in 1998, this anthology of eight separate but linked adventures, Tales from the Infinite Staircase, takes adventurers to exotic locales throughout the planes. A crossover product with the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, this is product serves as an introduction to Planescape, another campaign setting.

"Two hundred years ago, the great dwarf smith Durgeddin the Black built Khundrukar, a hidden stronghold for his war of vengeance against all orckind. For years Durgeddin labored, until the orcs discovered Khundrukar and stormed the citadel, slaying all within. Legends say that Durgeddin's masterful blades and glittering treasures were never found…."

The Forge of Fury, created in 2000 by Richard Baker, was the second in a series of eight stand-alone adventures for 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons. It details Khundrukar's five extensive levels of fierce tribes, dangerous obstacles, diabolical traps, and monstrous creatures.

In 2004, Forge of Fury was ranked the 12th greatest Dungeons & Dragons adventure of all time by Dungeon Magazine.

[Above: A screenshot from Wizards of the Coast's new dndclassics.com website. See the above image gallery for a sneak peek of some of the re-released products, as well as Wizards staff members reminiscing about their favorite old-school D&D adventures and rule books.]

We all remember our first time. Perhaps your best friend taught you. Or, someone showed you at recess or in the library after school. Maybe it happened with a group of friends. Or, alone in your bedroom, you figured it out all by yourself.

No, no that. I'm talking about the first time you played Dungeons & Dragons.

For many of us, those early experiences of exploring dungeons, slaying monsters and devouring bowls of Cheetos are inextricably linked to specific gaming products and their charmingly amateurish artwork of animated skeletons, spider queens, and aqua-colored dungeon maps.

Who can forget B1: In Search of the Unknown? Included in the D&D Basic Set, this adventure introduced many gamers to D&D. Or Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits, the epic culmination of the seven-part adventure that began with the twin trilogies G1-3: Against the Giants and "Drow" series of modules D1-D3? Or, one of my personal favorites, the deadly Tomb of Horrors, whose endless traps and tricks and demi-lich Acererak killed nearly every adventuring party that tried to enter it?

Alas, many of those rulebooks and adventures from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s have disappeared -- forgotten, made obsolete, or discarded with the trash by parents when young gamers went off to college. (Thanks, Mom!). Only occasionally do these out-of-print products resurface at yard sales, online shopping sites, or at specialized auctions. If they can be located, they're often only available for exorbitant prices.

Now, they're been brought back to life. Like a cleric casting a resurrection spell, Wizards of the Coast, the maker of D&D, is waving its magic wand and raising these lost products from the dead.

GeekDad can exclusively report that Wizards of the Coast is announcing today the launch of dndclassics.com, a site selling hundreds of these decades-old products available for download in PDF format.

The products for sale include a combination of core rules books, adventure series (what us old gamers call "modules"), supplement materials, and various backlist products from most of the D&D rules systems known to gaming-kind -- Basic, AD&D, AD&D 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition, 3.5 and 4.0 -- as well as specific campaign settings like Planescape and Ravenloft. Much of the materials on dndclassics.com date to the "Golden Age" of role-playing games, back when Gary Gygax's TSR Hobbies, Inc. ran the role-playing game industry, before his company was purchased by Wizards of the Coast.

"A lot people have a passion for and memories of these older products," said Liz Schuh, who directs publishing and licensing for Dungeons & Dragons. "We don't want them to go to torrent sites. Why not give them a legal route?" Schuh added that idea of re-releasing old products was a result of listening to fans on the forums, with the goal of letting "people play the D&D they want in the format they want."

In the first wave of items available today, more than 80 products can be downloaded from dndclassic.com, everything from the 1981 D&D Basic Game "Red Box" Rulebook to the 4th edition adventure H1: Keep on the Shadowfell, originally released in 2008. Prices range from $4.99 for most modules, to $17.99 for the newer manuals and supplements. The site is operated in partnership with DriveThruRPG, which claims to be "the largest RPG download store" on the Internet.

Mike Mearls, senior manager of Dungeons & Dragons research and development, likened the project of sifting through his company's vast archives and deciding which products to make available again much like a movie studio "going through a back catalogue" of old movies to decide what to release on DVD and Blu-ray. "You can always find these things on eBay," said Mearls. "But like baseball cards in the 1970s, no one took care of them. You have to pay a premium for it."

The PDFs are made from fresh scans of these old products. "We've rescanned everything," Schuh said. "It's the highest quality you can get out there." (I'd generally concur: The scans are good quality, and best of all, the PDFs are searchable. For example, you can search 1980's Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits for all instances of the word "Lolth" or "spider ship," which could come in handy during game play. I did see a few errors in the reproduction of multi-part gatefold-style maps, but hopefully these glitches will be resolved.)

Nostalgia is a powerful force in gaming, especially for gamers of my generation who first played D&D in the 1970s and 1980s. Was there something lost along the way, as TSR and RPGs became more successful? Is there anything we can learn from going back in time, and reading or trying to play the game with these old modules and rule books?

Mearls feels that players should appreciate the older game products, which allowed for more varied, less predictable styles of play. "Older style adventures, there is no script," he said, adding that players enjoy the "uncertainty" of the games' "element of chaos."

In the past year, Wizards has also been releasing premium print versions of AD&D rulebooks like their Dungeon Masters Guide and Monster Manual. They are scheduled to release more 1st edition AD&D and 2nd edition core rulebooks, and key 3.5 books, in the coming months.

The company also plans on releasing "conversion notes" so the older gaming products available on dndclassics.com can be played with newer editions of D&D, including the latest revamp of the rules, what is being called "D&D Next," now in development and scheduled to be released sometime in 2014.

Personally, I'm excited to get my hands on a copy of the AD&D manuals Deities & Demigods, from 1981, which finally let Dungeon Masters pit immortals like the Norse god Thor or heroes like Fritz Leiber's The Gray Mouser against players. (The book also came in handy for school reports on mythology. See the image gallery for more on that.) It'll be cool to see Vault of the Drow again, too. Gary Gygax's seminal 1978's module more or less introduced the idea of "dark elves" to fantasy.

Hopefully, in the next wave of products released by Wizards later this year, we'll see some of my other favorite items, like S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, which if you recall was actually a crash-landed space ship that dungeoneers had to explore. That blew my geeky mind back in the 1980s.

Oh, and that deadly, nasty, sadomasochistic and awesome Tombs of Horrors. I can't wait to take on that lich again--or die trying.

[ADDITIONAL NOTE: Thanks to a watchful reader, I have a correction: I neglected to mention in my original post that Wizards is also releasing, on March 19 of this year, Dungeons of Dread, these very same S-Series dungeons I was just pining for, in a premium hardcover edition. The collection includes four classic, stand-alone Advanced Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules: S1: Tomb of Horrors; S2: White Plume Mountain; S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks; and S4: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. More info.]

Created by Tom Moldvay, this 1981 edition of the D&D Basic Rulebook was actually the second edition of Basic D&D. The first edition, created by J. Eric Holmes in 1977, had a blueprint-style pale blue cover.

This 1981 edition was sold as part of the boxed D&D Basic Set as well as a separate product. It was the first true stand alone edition of what became "Basic D&D." Previous editions of Basic D&D had been based on OD&D ("Original D&D").

G1-3: Against the Giants was originally published as three separate adventures: G1: Steading of the Giant Chief, G2: The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, and G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King in 1978. Later, in 1981, they were collected in this G1-G3 edition.

The introductory text sets the scene: "Giants have been raiding the lands of men in large bands, with giants of different sorts in these marauding groups. Death and destruction have been laid heavily upon every place these monsters have visited. A party of the bravest and most powerful adventurers has been assembled and given the charge to punish the miscreant giants."

This trilogy, written by Gary Gyagx, also served as the start to the seven-part campaign that also includes D1: Descent into the Depths of the Earth, D2: Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, and D3: Vault of the Drow, and Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits -- named the top-rated adventure of all time by Dungeon Magazine.

Gygax once said he was inspired to create the "giants" series by the "heroic adventuring" of The Incomplete Enchanter by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague deCamp.

Bugbear guards, orc guards, sink holes, covered pits and portcullises -- all of D&D's classic dangers can be found in Against the Giants, this classic dungeon from 1978.

Says Mike Mearls, senior manager of Dungeons & Dragons research and development, "I’ve run this adventure in 3rd edition, 4th edition, and in D&D Next. It’s a litmus test of sorts for our playtesting. If the current version of D&D can’t handle The Steading of the Hill Giant Chieftain as written, there’s something wrong with the game. The tipping point for this adventure always comes early on. Do you sneak in and spy on the giants, or charge on in for a frontal assault? If you’ve read the adventure, you know what the right answer is."

Some of the charmingly amateurish artwork from Against the Giants. D&D's artists have gotten better, but cruder images such as seen here are seared into the memory banks of many an older gamer who played D&D back in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 2004, the Giants series (grouped with the entire 7-part giants-drow-demonweb series) was ranked 1st in the greatest Dungeons & Dragons adventure of all time by Dungeon Magazine.

T1-4: The Temple of Elemental Evil (1985), written by Gary Gygax and Frank Mentzer, was published in August 1985 as TSR's first "super module." Its 128-page book was easily double the size of any of TSR's adventures to date; it also included 16-page map book.

The first part of this mega-adventure was published years earlier as T1: "The Village of Hommlet" (1979). It was named the #4 adventure in Dungeon magazine's "The 30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time" list.

This map comes from N1: Against The Cult of the Reptile God, whose intro text begins this way:

"Terror by night! The village of Orlane is dying. Once a small and thriving community, Orlane has become a maze of locked doors and frightened faces. Strangers are shunned, trade has withered. Rumors flourish, growing wilder with each retelling. Terrified peasants flee their homes, abandoning their farms with no explanation. Others simply disappear …

"No one seems to know the cause of the decay -- why are there no clues? Who skulks through the twisted shadows of the night? Who or what is behind the doom that has overtaken the village? It will take a brave and skillful band of adventurers to solve the dark riddle of Orlane!"

N1: Against The Cult of the Reptile God appeared in 1982, and was written by Douglas Niles. It was named #19 in Dungeon Magazine's "30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time."

Deities & Demigods (1980) was the fourth hardcover release for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Despite being "just" a supplement, Gary Gygax saw Deities & Demigods as a way deities could take their proper spot in D&D campaigns as the patrons of clerics and as the exemplars of a character's ideal alignment.

Sadly, despite Gygax's original intent, for many players Deities & Demigods became another compendium of ultra-powerful "monsters" that could be killed by players.

It also came in handy for term papers. Says D&D's R&D Team Member James Wyatt: "I used this book as the main source for a paper I wrote in like 10th grade comparing various world mythologies. I was lucky to get a C!"

Perseus has armor class 3 and fights as the equivalent of a 15th level paladin.

Deities and Demigods gave all your favorite gods and heroes stats so your characters could kick their asses.

Mike Mearls, senior manager of Dungeons & Dragons research and development, also used the tome for school work. "I used this book as the primary reference for a project on mythology in 6th grade. Maybe my teacher was less discriminating than James’, but I got an A."

One of the cool aspects of Deities and Demigods were all the cosmological and religious answers it provided.

The holy text finally explained how, for example, the inner planes -- planet earth, the solar system, the universe and all of its parallels such as The Positive Material Plane, The Elemental Planes, The Ethereal Plane, The Plane of Shadow, etc. -- are connected to this funky disk of outer planes (e.g. The Outer Planes of Alignment) via the "yellow brick road" of the astral plane.

Sorry, Father Mulcahy, but Gary Gygax knows best. Mystery solved!

D3: Vault of the Drow, from 1978 and written by Gary Gygax, was the sixth adventure released by TSR. Like its two predecessors in the D-series, it was originally published with a purple monochrome cover (shown above).

During his lifetime, Gygax offered a few different sources for his drow. Ultimately, they're probably derived from the Svartálfaheimr — the dark elves of Norse mythology.
The drow have been making appearances since G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King, but they are given the full treatment here, including a description of one of their cities and details on their cutthroat noble families.

The Vault was the 6th part in a seven-part campaign that began with the three-part Against the Giants series and continued in the D-series, concluding with module Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits.

Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits was part seven of an epic campaign that began with the giants and drow series. In this last installment, characters are transported to another plane and find themselves in the muti-dimensional labyrinth known as the Demonweb. Characters must find their way out of the web, and then must defeat the evil demigoddess Lolth. Scary stuff.

This map shows the inter-weaved, multi-dimensional lair of Lolth, the evil spider queen, that befuddled many a player.

Bruce Cordell, another member of D&D's R&D team, offered this reminiscence:

"Queen of the Demonweb Pits was the first published adventure I experienced as a player. Because only my friend JD and I were available, we each made up 2 characters to adventure through the module. My two characters were Yor Demonslayer, a fighter, and Everin the Enchanter, an elf wizard. I was so excited by these characters, who were also the highest level characters I'd yet played, that I drew each one, colorized the drawings, backed each on cardboard, and protected them each under a layer of transparent grocery "cling-wrap." (30 years later, I still have them.)

"Unfortunately, my friend JD interpreted his –1 penalty on attack rolls curse he gained during the adventure to mean that he should act unpredictably. At one of the Demonweb crossings over an endless abyss, his character pushed Everin over, exclaiming, "I'm cursed!" So, that was the end for Everin."

Fiend Folio, which appeared in 1981, was the fifth hardcover book for AD&D, and the first book not part of Gary Gygax's original plan for the AD&D game.

Fiend Folio was also the first AD&D hardcover not produced at TSR or even in the United States. It began as a column for Games Workshop's White Dwarf magazine, edited by British gamer Don Turnbull.

The Ghost Tower of Inverness was originally written for the Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Game Tournament at Wintercon VIII, Detroit, 1979. Used in official tournaments, this adventure contains a challenging setting, a scoring system and characters specially prepared for the adventure.

The module was named #30 in Dungeon Magazine's "30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time."

First created for a tournament in 1979, C2: The Ghost Tower of Inverness, published in 1980, was written by Allen Hammack. It was the second adventure in D&D's competition series, "C."

From 1980-1983, Dungeons & Dragons was exploding in popularity, and most players first bought and used the Basic Set as their introduction to the game. Because of this fact, this module B2: Keep on the Borderlands, which appeared in the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, went on to become the module with the largest print run of all time, with an estimated 1.5 million copies made and distributed.

Once it was created in 1979, B2: Keep on the Borderlands immediately replaced In Search of the Unknown in the Basic boxed set.

This module was voted number 7 in Dungeon Magazine's "30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time."

"Do you have rope? A dagger? Holy water?"

The ubiquitous equipment list that players use to outfit their characters appears in the pages of Keep on the Borderlands.

OK, fine, we'll let you see some lost products from the 1990s, too.

First appearing in 1998, this anthology of eight separate but linked adventures, Tales from the Infinite Staircase, takes adventurers to exotic locales throughout the planes. A crossover product with the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, this is product serves as an introduction to Planescape, another campaign setting.

"Two hundred years ago, the great dwarf smith Durgeddin the Black built Khundrukar, a hidden stronghold for his war of vengeance against all orckind. For years Durgeddin labored, until the orcs discovered Khundrukar and stormed the citadel, slaying all within. Legends say that Durgeddin's masterful blades and glittering treasures were never found…."

The Forge of Fury, created in 2000 by Richard Baker, was the second in a series of eight stand-alone adventures for 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons. It details Khundrukar's five extensive levels of fierce tribes, dangerous obstacles, diabolical traps, and monstrous creatures.

In 2004, Forge of Fury was ranked the 12th greatest Dungeons & Dragons adventure of all time by Dungeon Magazine.

I’ve always looked for ways to de-clutter my life, and for well over ten years, I’ve always had some sort of scanner in my home. My earliest scanners were big, slow, clunky, and extremely finicky, and some of them were really only useful for saving scans as images, not actual documents that could be edited or searched. Later came a few new desktop scanners that allowed me to convert scanned images to text using OCR (optical character recognition) and save to different formats. Finally came the smaller, portable scanners that were fast, supported OCR, and could even save my documents to the cloud.

I have a couple of scanners in my home at various locations. One runs off an internal battery — no wall wart required — allowing my wife to scan anything she wishes immediately; I pull the scans off the device as needed by connecting it to my PC with a USB cable. I also have the Fujitsu ScanSnap 1300i that I use with my MacBook Air; it travels with me occasionally and allows me to send scans directly to my iPad. Both scanners work great, but I must admit that I do occasionally push them to their technological limits, and sometimes discover special scanning needs that neither device can provide.

Rather than list them out here, I’m going to explain to you some of the limitations I’ve encountered with my other scanners and then tell you how my new best friend, the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500, solves them all. I’ve been using the ScanSnap iX500 for a few weeks now; there was one instance of actual laugh-out-loud enjoyment and at least three or four exclamations of Cool! Continue Reading “See the iX500 — Super-Powered Scanner!” »

This was a good year in terms of getting my home office less cluttered, but I’m still fighting a major battle when it comes to my books. Paperback, hardback, non-fiction, and fiction… I finally exceeded my bookshelf space this year. It got bad enough with the stacks that I finally took a weekend and went through everything, dividing it all up into KEEP or DONATE. Six boxes of books made their way to Goodwill and I’ve still got a few more boxes that are going to a local high school’s library. Even with the culling, however, I still identified a number of KEEP books that I really wished I had purchased in digital format. Many of these books weren’t in digital format when I originally purchased them, and others were available as ebooks but only after reading the print version did I realize a digital version would have been a better investment. It’s a rare book that I purchase both in print and digital, and since 99.9% of publishers won’t provide a digital copy when you purchase a print copy, I now have a large number of print books that I can only reference from home (or by lugging them wherever I might wish to access them).

Another large stack that exists in my home can be found in my workshop — about five years’ worth of The Family Handyman (TFH) magazine. I can now get TFH in digital format on my iPad, but here’s the rub — I hate digital magazines! Yes, I read the occasional digital issues of Wired, Popular Mechanics, and Men’s Health on my iPad, and I love the multimedia features they offer such as animations, interactive elements, and other special effects… but each issue takes up a lot of space. You can delete an issue and reload it at any time, but that’s a hassle when I’d just like to reference a single article I read (not to mention the hassle in trying to remember the correct issue to reload). Until digital magazines offer me the ability to rip out an article and save it to my iPad so I can ditch the rest of the issue, I’m sticking with print magazines. Every month, I sit down with my personal scanner and scan in a small stack of articles that I’ve ripped from my print subscriptions — I convert them with OCR so I can search using keywords. It works great!

But the problem with The Family Handyman is that often 75% or more of the magazine I wish to keep. The magazine has tool reviews, How-To articles, special hands-on projects, and much more. That’s why I don’t rip up my TFH magazines! I just can’t predict when I might need that How-To article on repairing a toilet or adding additional wiring to a closet or finding the Editor’s Best circular saw. I still end up having to hunt through the issues occasionally, trying to find some special article that I remember reading but uncertain of which issue. TFH doesn’t have a year-end Index in the December issue, so I frequently find myself wishing I had the digital versions so I could do keyword searches.

So, to summarize, I’ve got hardback and paperback books I wish I had in digital format, but I don’t want to spend more money buying the digital version. I’ve also got TFH magazines taking up space because I don’t have the storage space on my iPad to store years’ worth of issues. Add to this the fact that I can’t search the TFH magazines quickly for a particular review or article.

As a self-described efficiency ninja, these issues have been driving me crazy for some time. I’ve investigated building myself a book scanner — there are plenty of plans out there for building your own, but none that have impressed me in terms of easy-to-build or easy-to-use… or both. So I started looking for alternatives.

I can’t remember where I read about 1DollarScan.com, but I owe someone out there a big thanks for the recommendation. 1DollarScan is a service that will take your books (hardback and paperback), magazines, and other business documents and convert them for you at very reasonable prices. I decided to put 1DollarScan to the test a few weeks ago, and I’m now going to share with you my experiences.

The Process

1DollarScan.com requires you to create an account before you start using their service. All the services they offer must be paid for up-front; 1DollarScan makes it pretty easy to figure out the total cost by charging $1 for every 100 pages of a book (rounded up). Want to scan a 325 page book? $4 will get you a basic scan of that book (cover included for paperbacks, not for hardbacks). This is the basic, no-frills scan. You won’t get OCR, high-resolution scan (600DPI versus the basic 300DPI), or insurance (a rescan if you’re unhappy with the results). But if you’ve got a $10, $15, or $30 book that you’d like converted to digital, $1 per 100 pages will get it done. 1DollarScan calls that 100 pages a set, so start thinking in terms of sets. A 380 page book = 4 sets. A 135 page magazine = 2 sets. And so on.

It’s the frills where 1DollarScan really makes its money. You select from various options such as OCR (so you can search the PDF scans using keywords), high-resolution scan (600DPI versus 300DPI), document compression, and more. Magazines are charged just like books, but you pay $1 extra per set, so a 120 page magazine will cost you $4 ($2 for the pages and $2 for 2 sets). You can pay $2 per set for Express Service (faster scanning and delivery) and $2 per set for high resolution scanning. If you’re not careful, you’ll quickly find a 400 page book costing $10 or more for the scan and frills, fast approaching the potential price of the actual digital version you can purchase from Amazon or elsewhere.

After picking your options, you pay, get a special Scan ID number, and print out a couple of forms to go with your box of books (one being a signed document that you are the legal owner of the books — 1DollarScan covering themselves legally). You then ship your books and magazines to 1DollarScan, they scan them, and then they recycle the books. You get an email that provides you with links to download your PDF files.

Pretty simple, but there’s one more factor you need to consider — shipping costs. Unless you go with the basic no-frills scan, by the time you’ve added in a few frills per set and divided the cost of shipping by the number of books you’re sending, you may find that the average cost of each scan is $15 or higher… much higher than the cost to just buy a digital version online. Use the USPS for slow-shipping to save some money and only initiate the service when you have a large number of books to scan so you keep the average shipping cost per book as low as possible.

My Test

My test of the 1DollarScan process began by picking out three different items. First, I picked an 84 page copy of The Family Handyman magazine. The second item was a large paperback book titled How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive. (An excellent book for any kid – great drawings, great explanations of mechanical concepts, and just a classic book to own!) The third book was a hardback titled The Next Decade. Here’s how the basic no-frills scan breaks down:

At $1 per set, the basic no-frills scan was $10. ($9 for the 9 sets plus $1 per magazine set = $10.)

I have no need for OCR for the two books, but it was an absolute requirement for the magazine. I chose the High Quality scan at $2 per set and the High Resolution Scan at $2 per set, so now I was up to $14. 1DollarScan requires you to split up book and magazine orders, so I submitted my first order for $8 for the two books and another order for the magazine of $6. I tell you this only because each order generates a custom ID number that must be written on the box you ship. I packed up my books and magazines together, wrote the ID numbers on the outside, and included the required signed documents inside the box.

Shipping cost (UPS Ground) was $15 — I really should have shipped it USPS at $9, but this was a test of their service and I really wanted to get my scans back as fast as possible. That said, I was now looking at $5 shipping per book or $29 for 3 books… or approximately $10 per book. The Volkswagen repair book doesn’t come in digital, but the Kindle version of The Next Decade is $12 from Amazon. It’s the magazine that really hurt… at $5 for shipping and $6 for scan/frills, I was looking at $11 to scan a $1 magazine. Ouch! What I really should have done is ship about 15 to 20 magazines all at once to reduce the cost substantially, but again… this was a test and I wasn’t ready to lose my TFH magazines if the scans weren’t good quality.

1DollarScan claims that the basic scan (without paying the extra $2 per set for Express Delivery that delivers PDFs in 5-10 business days) will take 2-4 weeks. Yes, I said weeks. But that wasn’t my experience! I didn’t pay for Express Delivery, and I got my scans 2 days after the books arrived! Don’t assume this is typical, but I think 1DollarScan overestimates their delivery time to allow for large bulk orders. I only sent three books, so maybe I just got lucky… your results may vary.

So, two days after 1DollarScan got my books, I received two emails. One email had a link to download the scan of the magazine. The other email had two links, one per book. Downloading them by clicking the link was extremely frustrating, with many failures. I eventually traced it to my web browser (Safari). When I switched over to Chrome, the links immediately began the downloads. I think it’s important to click the links if you have a download manager of some sort installed, something that can restart a download (like Chrome can do) from the last point rather than starting over. Just my 2-cent suggestion.

The Results

The three PDFs did not have the names of the books/magazine as the filenames. 1DollarScan charges extra for this ($1 per set!!), but honestly… just open the document, see what it is, and then rename the file yourself. After opening them and renaming the files, here are the file sizes:

1. How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive — 478 pages — 398MB

2. Family Handyman Magazine February 2012 — 84 pages — 216MB

3. The Next Decade — 247 pages — 110MB

Large files, yes, but the quality of the scans was very impressive! Remember, the magazine was a full-color scan, so the 216MB at first was a shock, but then I remembered I’d paid for a high-quality scan. Here’s a screen capture of a page from the magazine scan that I’ve zoomed in on… as you can see, zoomed in the resolution is quite good! (Not sure how the screenshot will look for you, but trust me… at actual-size, the PDF file looks outstanding on my iPad.)

The same level of resolution was found in the PDFs for the books. And keep in mind, I didn’t pay for the high-quality scans of the black-and-white books! Here’s a screenshot from the Volkswagen book at full-size. As you can see, fully readable and it looks great on my iPad screen.

If you look very carefully, you might notice a slight angle on the image. I didn’t pay for the Angle Correction, so not every scanned page is perfectly vertical. Looking through the book, I’d estimate about 1 out of every 20 pages or so has a slight angle to the page. I can live with that, but if you cannot you’ll want to pay the $2 per set for the High Quality Touch Up that includes OCR, Angle Correction, and Compression.

Speaking of Compression, there’s another really cool feature that 1DollarScan offers at no additional cost. It’s called Fine-Tuning, and it’s a service that you can use to apply some additional work to the PDF if you know you’ll be displaying it on a specific digital device. Included in this Fine-Tuning is a bit of compression, reducing the file size. How much? I ran all three of my PDFs through the Fine-Tune process (you can only submit one PDF at a time, and it seems to take 30 minutes to an hour for the process to be completed… you get another email when the document is done). Here are the results:

3. The Next Decade — 247 pages — 42MB (compared to non-tuned original at 110MB)

Now, here’s the deal… the PDFs were greatly reduced in size, but the quality of the scan is also degraded a little bit… or a lot. I think it depends on the digital reader you select to use for the Fine-Tune (you choose from iPad, iPhone, iPod, Kindle 4, Kindle 3, Nook, Android Tablet, and many more options). I’ve taken a screenshot of the Basic versus Enhanced (Fine-Tuned) versions side by side that I’m sharing here. It might be a bit difficult for you to see, but the text on the right with the Fine-Tuned version is a little fuzzy around the edges if you look closely. The original, hi-resolution version is on the left. On some pages, it’s not very noticeable… on others, it’s quite obvious. On my iPad, however, the Fine-Tuned version is acceptable. And since it’s about 1/10th the filesize, if I wanted to keep these files on my iPad, I could store hundreds of issues without worrying about running out of space.

Here’s a better example where the Fine-Tuned version’s text is much more noticeably degraded. It comes from the data page on the Volkswagen book — look at the printing history and you’ll see the quality of the text is much lower. (Fine-Tuned version on left, original version on right.)

Still, the fine-tuned version of the book didn’t look all that bad on my iPad until I enlarged the screen. At normal reading size, the text was still easily readable, and at 1/4th the filesize, keeping a copy of the Volkswagen book on my iPad for fast reference would make more sense if I were actually using it as a repair reference book.

There’s really no reason not to submit all your PDFs for the Fine-Tune process. It doesn’t cost anything extra (other than the extra time required), so having two versions might make sense to you if you wish to store a copy on a digital device rather than on a hard drive. I can’t remember how long you have, but there is a limited period of time that you can submit a document for Fine-Tuning (I think its 14 days, but don’t hold me to that), so use it or lose it.

Final Thoughts

I’m very impressed with the PDF files I received, but the real question is whether I’ll use 1DollarScan again. I would answer yes for books and maybe for magazines. For books, the basic no-frills scan is certainly acceptable. I can live with the infrequent page that is slightly askew (and by slightly, I mean hardly noticeable), and the filesize of the original PDF (non-fine-tuned) is acceptable given the page counts. I probably will only send books for scanning when I can get 10-20 books per shipped box to keep the shipping costs low and keep the average shipping cost at $3 per book (which probably means USPS instead of FedEx or UPS Ground).

At $1 for every 100 pages, the cost of a basic scan is certain to be lower than a digital version purchased online. If I can manage to keep the total scan cost per book under $8, then I’ll certainly use 1DollarScan for those books I no longer wish to keep on my shelf BUT absolutely still want to keep and not donate.

As for magazines… given that most of the magazines I subscribe to fall between $1 and $3 and are typically between 100 and 200 pages, it actually costs me more than the magazine for a high quality scan with OCR. The Family Handyman, for example, costs me $1 per issue as a subscriber to the print edition, and most issues are more than 100 pages but less than 200. So the base cost is $2 (2 sets) plus $1 per set for being a magazine, so now the cost is up to $4 for a scan. If I ship 24 issues at $12 for shipping, that’s $0.50 per issue for shipping. So now I’m up to $4.50 per scanned issue. This just isn’t a smart financial move. (1DollarScan will take dropped off boxes if you live in their neck of the woods — San Jose, CA — so if you live there, you can really save some money!)

So, what do I do about this magazine collection? Well, I’ve got something interesting to share with you early next month (Jan 2013), but until then I am not allowed to comment. But as they say… there are always options.

If you’ve got some books (or magazines) that you’re just itching to convert to digital, then 1DollarScan is a reliable solution. I’m very impressed with the scans, the customer support (I emailed them a number of times with questions related to how to figure costs and calculating sets), and the a la carte pricing options. By the way, they do have membership plans that allow you to pay a monthly fee for a guaranteed number of sets scanned per month. If you expect to be sending them a lot of books to scan, you may very well find the Premium membership plans worth investigating. As soon as I get those books I wish to scan (and not get back) pulled out and counted, I’ll know if a membership is a better price option for me.

Two final thoughts. One, as I get these scanned PDFs of my books, they’re all being stored on an external hard drive and backed up to DVD. I’d rather not have to buy these books ever again (or even buy them and then convert to digital), so I’ll be taking lots of precautions to protect my investments and my book collection so that these books will always be there for me. And two, the OCR is outstanding! I type in a keyword and the PDF jumps right to it. I picked out a dozen strange and unique words I found in the magazine scan and the search found each and every one of them. (But again, I likely won’t be using 1DollarScan for my magazine collection, but I do have an option that I can’t wait to share with you next month.) If you need OCR for your books, I imagine it will work just as well as it does for magazine scans.